Transcripts and Captions
Transcripts and captions make content that’s easier for viewers to digest and read (even in different languages), and has awesome SEO benefits.
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Transcripts and captions make it easy for viewers to digest the content of your media. They’re a critical part of accessibility, but they are also helpful for longer form and educational content in any language. Wistia captions are also interactive, which means they’re searchable and viewers can jump right to a certain point in the media by clicking on a section of subtitles.
Whether you’re trying to make sure people can get the message of your media (even without the sound), looking to expand your viewer base with multilingual captions, or just searching for a little more love in the media SEO department, they’re a great addition to your content.
Transcription Keywords
If you’re ordering automated transcripts and have words in your media that may be harder to transcribe (acronyms, industry terms, product names), you can add a list of keywords in your account. To do so, head to your Account Settings page and scroll down to the “Transcription Keywords” section.
Once complete, scroll down to click “Save Settings.”
Interactive Transcripts
Interactive transcripts allow viewers to navigate to different parts of your media by scrolling through or searching the captions file. Open the captions menu from the play bar and select “Search Video", then search for keywords or phrases to jump to a specific part of the video.
Below a media, the transcript will also highlight each word as it is spoken. Clicking on a specific word will take you to that point in the media.
SRT Formatting
SRT stands for “SubRip Text,” which is a basic subtitle format. If you’d prefer not to order your captions through us, SRT files can be created and edited using most text editors.
The correct formatting for an SRT file is comprised of four parts:
The number for each subtitle (begins with 1).
The beginning and ending time for each subtitle, formatted as
hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds
, and separated by-->
. There should be one space between the starting time and the-->
, and one space between the-->
and the ending time.The subtitle text. This can be on one or more lines.
A blank line before the start of the next subtitle.
Here is an example:
1
00:00:00,500 --> 00:00:03,840
You can add captions in any
language to your Wistia medias.
2
00:00:03,840 --> 00:00:06,337
French, Spanish,
Japanese, Arabic.
3
00:00:06,337 --> 00:00:08,420
When your viewers click
the closed captions button
4
00:00:08,420 --> 00:00:10,711
on the player, they can choose
their preferred language
5
00:00:10,711 --> 00:00:11,800
from a drop-down menu.
6
00:00:11,800 --> 00:00:15,180
Croatian, Czech, Hungarian.
7
00:00:15,180 --> 00:00:17,520
Now your media's message
is accessible to anyone
8
00:00:17,520 --> 00:00:19,004
from anywhere.
9
00:00:19,004 --> 00:00:19,820
Anywhere.
10
00:00:19,820 --> 00:00:22,270
Persian, Latin.
Exporting SRT Files
Now that your captions are formatted correctly, you’ll want to save them as an SRT file.
Here’s how you can save your file as an .srt in TextEdit:
- Format -> Make Plain Text (or Shift + Command + T)
- File -> Save
- Name your file and edit the extension to be .srt
Once you save your file with the .srt extension, you’ll be good to go!
VTT Formatting
VTT stands for “Video Text Tracks.” The first line of a VTT file needs to be “WEBVTT” and the formatting is similar to an SRT file.
The beginning and ending time for each subtitle needs to be formatted as hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds
, and separated by -->
. There should be one space between the starting time and the -->
, and one space between the -->
and the ending time. Then comes the subtitle text, which can be one or more lines, then a blank line before the start of the next subtitle.
Exporting VTT Files
Here’s how you can save your file as a .vtt in TextEdit:
- Format -> Make Plain Text (or Shift + Command + T)
- File -> Save
- Name your file and edit the extension to be .vtt
Troubleshooting
SRT and VTT files need to follow the above formatting exactly, otherwise the upload to Wistia will fail.
Here are some common issues that can occur:
Captions are formatted correctly, but still getting rejected. You might have an em-dash! An em-dash ( — ) can sometimes be inserted by word processors if you double tap the hyphen key (-). Depending on your text editor’s font, a timing arrow with an em dash can look identical to a correctly formatted one.
Here’s a quick example:
-->
, can actually be — -> !You can check for these by pasting a sample time stamp into another text field. These are also easier to pick up on with an automated captions checker.
Special characters are displaying as � � � instead. The solution to this is to encode your SRT files as UTF-8. Sometimes they’ll be exported in other encodings like UTF-16.
File is encoded in UTF-8 and is being rejected. If everything else is in order, check to be sure that your file is encoded in UTF-8, and not
UTF-8 with BOM
. A Byte Order Mark (BOM) is a special character that can get inserted at the start of certain text files, and can sometimes be hard to detect since it’s not visible in most editors.
Familiar with using command line applications via your computer’s terminal? If so, you can use the handy tool Subcheck to scan whole SRT files for errors. It can even make automatic adjustments to the file!
If you’re having trouble working out the exact issue with a file, you can always reach out to our Support Team for assistance!